Seven years after four companies applied for the .gay top-level domain, we finally have a winner.

Three applicants, including the community-driven bid that has been fighting ICANN for exclusive recognition for years, this week withdrew their applications, leaving Top Level Design the prevailing bidder.

Top Level Design is the Portland, Oregon registry that already runs .ink, .design and .wiki.

The withdrawing applicants are fellow portfolio registries Donuts and MMX, and community applicant dotgay LLC, which had been the main holdout preventing the contention set being resolved.

I do not yet know how the settlement was reached, but it smells very much like a private auction.

As a contention set only goes to auction with consent of all the applicants, it seems rather like it came about after dotgay finally threw in the towel.

dotgay was the only applicant to apply as a formal “community”, a special class of applicant under ICANN rules that gives a no-auction path to delegation if a rigorous set of tests can be surmounted.

Under dotgay’s plan, registrants would have to have been verified gay or gay-friendly before they could register a .gay domain, which never sat right with me.

The other applicants, Top Level Design included, all proposed open, unrestricted TLDs.

dotgay, which had huge amounts of support from gay rights groups, failed its Community Priority Evaluation in late 2014. The panel of Economist Intelligence Unit experts awarded it 10 out the 16 available points, short of the 14-point prevailing threshold.

Basically, the EIU said dotgay’s applicant wasn’t gay enough, largely because its definition of “gay” was considered overly broad, comprising the entire LGBTQIA+ community, including non-gay people.

Since October 2017, dotgay has been in ICANN’s Cooperative Engagement Process, a form of negotiation designed to avert a formal, expensive, Independent Review Process appeal, and the contention set had been on hold.

The company evidently decided it made more sense to cut its losses by submitting to an auction it had little chance of winning, rather than spend six or seven figures on a lengthy IRP in which it had no guarantee of prevailing.

Top Level Design, in its application, says it wants to create “the most safe, secure, and prideful .gay TLD possible” and that it is largely targeting “gay and queer people as well as those individuals that are involved in supporting gay cultures, such as advocacy, outreach, and civil rights.”

But, let’s face it, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of porn in there too.

There’s no mention in the winning bid of any specific policies to counter the abuse, such as cyberbullying or overt homophobia, that .gay is very likely to attract.

Top Level Design is likely to take .gay to launch in the back end of the year.

The settlement of the contention set is also good news for two publicly traded London companies.

MMX presumably stands to get a one-off revenue boost (I’m guessing in seven figures) from losing another auction, while CentralNic, Top Level Design’s chosen back-end registry provider, will see the benefits on an ongoing basis.

Neustar is losing its chief privacy officer, Becky Burr, who also sits on ICANN’s board of directors.

Burr, a lawyer, said last week that she’s decided to return to private practice after almost seven years at the registry.

Her last day will be March 1, but she’ll continue to advise the company as outside counsel on issues such as privacy and .us policy.

Lips are sealed on her exact destination, but it’s apparently small, Washington, DC-based, and focused on data protection.

Prior to Neustar, Burr worked for the law firm Wilmer Hale. Prior to that, she was in the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where she helped create ICANN 20 years ago.

Despite no longer being directly employed by a registry or registrar, Burr said she’s hoping to be reelected to the ICANN board, where she represents the Contracted Parties House, when her current term expires at the end of the year.

In addition to .us, Neustar runs .co, .biz and acts as back-end for dozens of other TLDs.

An internationalized domain name ccTLD is reportedly getting buried because of a confusion about how many dots should appear.

Armenia’s .հայ (.xn--y9a3aq) today has fewer than 300 registered domains, well under 1% of the volume enjoyed by the Latin-script .am, apparently due to a unique quirk of the Armenian language.

According to a report in the local tech press, sourcing a registry VP, .հայ domains are not working because of how the Armenian script uses punctuation.

In Armenian, a full-stop or period is represented by two vertically aligned dots called a verjaket that looks pretty much identical to a colon in English and other Latin-based languages.

A single dot, looking and positioned exactly like a Latin period, is called a mijaket and is used in the same way English and other languages use a colon.

It’s not entirely clear whether the problem lies with the user, the keyboards, the browsers, or elsewhere, but it’s plain to see how confusion could arise when you have Armenian-script characters on both sides of a Latin-script dot.